News feminist philosophers can use

Women arrested for sex attacks on men

Police in Zimbabwe on Friday charged three women found in possession of 33 condoms containing semen with 17 counts of aggravated indecent assault in a case that may be a break in a string of sex attacks over the past two years by women targeting male hitchhikers.

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Watch Ruparanganda, a professor of sociology at the University of Zimbabwe said : “Some sections of the society use these sperm for ritual purposes. The thinking is that it can be used for regeneration of life since they are source of life (biologically). Some people think that they can have their bad luck gone by using semen. I am sure that explains all this we have been witnessing (men being forced).”

3 thoughts on “Women arrested for sex attacks on men”

It’s a difficult subject. I just read an article in a Belgian paper in which a woman accused of raping a man was acquitted because Belgian law has a very narrow view of what constitutes rape (necessitating, for instance, the victim being penetrated, which means a woman forcing a man to penetrate her doesn’t meet the rapist criteria). However, even if the law recognises the fact that women can rape men (and other women), the lack of understanding surrounding this phenomenon may still make it difficult to succesfully prosecute and convict these women.
(here’s the link to the article, but the original article is in Dutch: http://www.critical-sass.net/2011/10/16/the-past-week-in-hyperlinks-33/)

This reminds me of certain (in)famous cases of female mental health professionals having sex with male patients/clients. Of course, most of these cases arguably involve complex (counter)transference if not some sort of seduction, as opposed to the traditional understanding of an “attack”. Still, regardless of the biological sex of the mental health professional, such relations are a crime in several states, and many (though certainly not all or perhaps most) “experts” on the matter regard such sex as not consensual and a form of rape, sexual abuse, malpractice, and/or serious professional boundary violations. Abuses of power (including sexual transgressions) manifest themselves in many different ways in many different cultural contexts.
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(In)Famously, many people who have (or have held) various important positions in the mental health field are happily married to former patients, though many theorists argue that such marriages cannot really be truly “happy” or “healthy” ones either by definition or theoretical analysis of such relationship dynamics.
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Perhaps many individuals cases (regardless of whether they involve mental health professionals) are not known in order to protect the victims of such crimes (same in the male case as in the female case?).
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The cases that quickly come to my mind include the debated one of Margaret Bean-Bayog, and the somewhat undisputed cases of (otherwise arguably very important psychoanalysts such as): Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and even Margaret Mahler. There are many other cases often not explicitly recorded in publication, or that unclearly seem to come dangerously close, as in the case of Melanie Klein.
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Of course, the power imbalances between males and females resulting from pervasive forms of gender/sex inequalities may, or may not, make an important difference in such cases involving male and female mental health professionals.
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What do others think?
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– David Slutsky
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